Along with rapid development of digital information technology, the digital information technology goes beyond the traditional commercial limit, and electronic products of the consumption field and office equipment of enterprises have been generally digitalized. There are more and more digital entertainment devices and digitalized domestic electrical appliances in common homes. These devices are connected in a wire or wireless mode constituting a LAN (Local Area Network) within the home, so as to share the contents or the access to the Internet, or control each other conveniently, which is the concept of digital home network that the industry is conceiving and pulling off.
In the near future, the home network connecting to the Internet through a home gateway will enter a remote control application phase, so that people can remotely know and control a device within the home network while being outside the home network, for example people may remotely switch on the air-conditioner in their houses and learn in advance while being in office how much food is left in the refrigerator and remotely examine the operation of home security system.
There are two methods of implementing the digital home network in the prior art.
The first method of implementing the digital home network is that directly and remotely controlling the home network by logging on the network. The method is as the following.
The user logs on the home gateway that is a master device of the home network from the Internet in the manner of Internet Protocol (IP) addressing or domain name addressing, or through visiting the web page provided by the service provider.
The home gateway calls the corresponding application to read the current state information of various devices within the home network through a certain medium, and conducts the correlative processing and generates interface data. For example the information of each device can be collected by using the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play)/IGRS (Intelligent Grouping & Resource Sharing) protocol.
The home gateway sends the interface data to the user through the Internet. The user can see the state information of various devices in his house through a browser and control the devices by clicking various buttons to which the devices within the home network relates on the browser page.
The pages may be generated by a server of the service provider according to the data provided by the home gateway, may be organized and generated by the home gateway itself or generated and pushed to the user browser by the device itself within the home network.
The browser of the user may be a personal computer (PC), a mobile phone or other terminals with a display interface.
There are various control protocols, for example the UPnP/IGRS protocol can be used for control.
The drawbacks of the above scheme include that the user needs to pay the added surfing expenses because the home gateway has to be on-line all the time, and the terminal that can visit the Internet with a display interface is required, for example a PC, a mobile phone with a browser function.
The above leads to higher cost of remote control, for example, it is required to purchase a computer or a slap-up mobile phone. In addition, the expense is high if people surf in the Internet by using a mobile phone.
Moreover, the above two preconditions do not exist in some cases, for example, when the user goes to tour in a mountainous area which is not covered by signals, he can not surf in the Internet by using a mobile phone and can not know the operation of devices within the home network, even though it is necessary to perform the remote control at this time.
Furthermore, the mode of using the browser requires that the users have enough technical knowledge.
The second method of implementing the digital home network is that indirectly and remotely controlling the digital home network by logging on the network to receive and transmitting an E-Mail. The second method is as the following.
A user writes an E-Mail having the contents that the user wants to check and control in a special format and sends the E-Mail to a particular mail box.
A home gateway logs on the Internet periodically, visits the mail box and reads the E-Mail mentioned above.
The home gateway analyzes the content of the E-Mail, calls the corresponding application according to demands of the E-Mail, reads the current state information of various devices within the home network through a certain medium, conducts the corresponding processing and generates the interface data. For example the information of each device can be collected by using the UPnP/IGRS protocol.
The home gateway sends these data to the user by an E-Mail. The user can see the state information of various devices within the home network by browsing the E-Mail and control these devices by the interaction with the E-Mail.
The drawbacks of this method include the followings.
The response speed is low.
A terminal that can visit the E-Mail mail box on the Internet with a display interface is required, for example a PC or a mobile phone with the browser function.
The above leads to higher cost of remote control, for example, it is required to purchase a computer or a slap-up mobile phone. In addition, the expense is high if people surf in the Internet by using a mobile phone.
Moreover, the above two preconditions may not exist in some cases, for example, when the user goes to tour in a mountainous area which is not covered by the signal, he can not surf in the Internet by using the mobile phone and can not know the operation of devices within the home network, even though it is necessary to perform the remote control at this time.
Furthermore, the mode of using the browser requires that the users have enough technical knowledge.
Thus, a system and a method for remotely controlling the home network devices are needed, so as to control the device of the network directly without support of a special device or the area restriction, and with low expense.